The articles and essays in this blog range from the short to the long. Many of the posts are also introductory (i.e., educational) in nature; though, even when introductory, they still include additional commentary. Older material (dating back mainly to 2005) is being added to this blog over time.

Thursday, 4 June 2015

Quine's 'On What There Is' (1948)

What
is Existence?

Quine
discusses what he calls the “old Platonic riddle of non-being”
(or “Plato’s beard”). The position is that if we talk about
something, it must exist or have some kind of being. Even if we talk
about something that doesn't exist, it must in some way have being;
otherwise “what is it that there is not?”

Of
course it depends here on what is meant by the word 'exist'.
Traditionally there have been different kinds or grades of existence,
so the problem is more difficult than it initially looks. But even if
we accept wholly mental existence, or non-spatiotemporal existence,
what kind of existence would the round square have? Even that thing,
according to Meinong, has some kind of existence or being. But
Quine does not tackle the issue of modes of existence, but that of
meaning and reference.

Meaning
& Reference

Quine
tackles the case of Pegasus.

McX
(Quine’s fictional adversary) says that if “Pegasus were not…we
should not be talking about anything when we use the word”. Indeed
it would even be “nonsense to say that Pegasus is not”. This is
why some semanticists think that the locution “God does not exist”
is as meaningless as “God exists”. McX would argue: Who is
this ‘God’ who does not exist? This was the problem Russell
attempted to solve in his ‘Existence and Description’. The
problem can be called the Problem of Empty Reference.

Quine
himself refers to Bertrand Russell’s famous take on the problem;
and he largely endorses it. Russell himself attempted to solve this
problem by getting rid of proper names. Thus

“The
author of Waverley was a poet.”

became

“Someone
(better: something) wrote Waverley and was a poet, and nothing
else wrote Waverley.”

The
second example is the logical grammar behind the surface (or
everyday) grammar of the original example. We can ask here if version
two is a translation, a version or simply an alternative. I would say
that the second example is an alternative rather than a logically
precise version or translation. That is, it may well be
philosophically problematic as it stands; though that doesn’t make
the alternative a translation or version. When someone utters the
first example, he doesn’t “really mean” the second example. He
may be making philosophical mistakes in the first example; though
that doesn’t make the second example a version or translation of
the original.

For
example, the idea of “nothing else wrote Waverley” would
be farther from the mind of the utterer of the first example as
anything could be. The second example is more of an imposition than a
version or translation.

Quine
goes into a little detail about why Russell substituted the second
example for the first. As I said, it was primarily an attempt to get
rid of names. What we have in the second example is a substitution of
variables of quantification for the original names. The quantifiers
in the second example are 'something' and 'nothing' (others include
'everything'). So these quantifiers aren’t names. They don’t work
like names. What they do is “refer to entities generally”.

How
did this help Russell and Quine?

If
you don't name a specific thing, then you're not ontologically
committed to that thing’s existence. “The author of Waverley”
is a definite description of a specific individual. On the other
hand, “something” isn't and it's not existentially committed. In
other words, we're talking about “some thing”, not a specific
thing named either by a definite description or a proper name.

The
problem is more pronounced when someone makes an utterance about
someone’s or something’s non-existence. Again, to what or whom is
he referring if that person or thing doesn’t exist? So we have two
examples of a locution again:

“The
author of Waverley is not.”

becomes

“Either
each thing failed to write or two or more things wrote Waverley.”

In
the above example the quantifier is more convoluted in expression.
Instead of the quantifier 'everything' we have 'each thing' (the
universal quantifier). Here we don’t talk about a specific entity
(i.e. the author of Waverley); but to “each thing” or to
“two or more things”. As Quine puts it, the second version
“contains no expression purporting to name the author of Waverley”.

Later
in the paper Quine recapitulates on these issues. Again he stresses
the need to erase names. So what do we use to refer to entities? We
use variables. More precisely, as Quine puts it: “to be assumed as
an entity is…to be reckoned as the value of a variable.” And,
again, the point of variables is that they are non-specific. That is,
they don't name particulars. As Quine points out, variables are
therefore like pronouns (e.g., 'it', 'this').

What’s
the point of these logical substitutions to the originals? It's to
stop us naming non-existents and thus escaping from Plato’s beard.

(The
reasons for this approach can't be gone into here. I suggest that the
reader consult Russell’s original paper.)

Sense
& Reference

Quine
follows this account of Russell with an account of what Frege
called “sense and reference”.

What's
the meaning of a proper name? In Quine and Frege’s case, what are
the meanings of the names 'Morning Star' and the 'Evening Star'? The
references, that is, the stars themselves, can’t be the meanings of
the two proper names because they both refer to the same thing: viz.,
the planet Venus.

This
distinction between meaning and reference had already been well made
before Quine; though Quine uses it to get back to the Pegasus problem
he tackled earlier in the paper.

The
reason why McX made his mistake about thinking that names must refer
is that he “confused the alleged named object Pegasus with the
meaning of the word ‘Pegasus’”. That is, he didn’t
distinguish reference from meaning (as in the Morning Star example).
McX thought that the meaning of the name ‘Pegasus’ must be the
thing Pegasus. But, as Frege showed, if the reference were
identical with the meaning, the planet Venus wouldn’t have two
names.

It
follows that we can now talk about all sorts of non-existents without
committing ourselves to their existence. If reference isn't identical
with meaning (or sense), then a name can have meaning without it
having a specific reference (at least a spatio-temporal reference).
And that’s what Pegasus is meant to be: a spatio temporal winged
horse; not an idea in one or in many minds or an abstract object.

Quine
separates meaning and reference; though what has he to say about
meanings themselves? This is where Quine is much more original and
less Fregean.

Meanings

Quine’s
position on meaning (or meanings) is quite radical (or at least it
was in 1948). To put it quite plainly: Quine rejects meanings (as
traditionally characterised). However, in order to stop people
getting too outraged, he almost immediately says: “…[I do not]
thereby deny that words and statements are meaningful.” At a prima
facie level, this statement appears to contradict Quine's
position. Though, of course, Quine goes on to clarify his position on
meaning/s.

Quine
agrees with all of us that certain locutions are either meaningful
or meaningless. However, this isn't because these locutions
express pre-existing entities that we call 'meanings'. Meanings
aren't Platonic entities in the Third Realm; they aren't mental
entities in the mind; they aren't abstract objects of any
description; and neither are they mental images. So what’s left for
meaning to be?

Quine
clarifies his position in the following manner. He accepts that two
locutions can have the same meaning. However, they don’t do so
because both locutions match (as it were) a pre-existing abstract
meaning that's somehow expressed by the two locutions.

Why
does Quine think they have the same meaning? It's simply a case of
language referring to language, rather than language referring to
abstract entities (or even 'denotata'). That is, both locutions have
the same meaning if they can be expressed by a third version that
expresses more or less the same thing (usually “in a clearer
language than the original”).

Thus
the meaning of a sentence is given by another sentence, rather than
by it matching up to an abstract entity we call a 'meaning' or
'proposition'. If the meaning/proposition were an abstract entity,
how could a locution match it at all? How can a contingent verbal
locution possibly match something what is possibly a timeless
non-linguistic thing? How do you match two completely unlike
things?

Quine
calls these different linguistic versions of the same
meaning/proposition 'synonyms'. So just as single words can have
their synonyms, so too can whole sentences and even, perhaps,
collections of sentences.

The
Epistemology of What There Is

Towards
the end of ‘On What There Is’ Quine gets away from ontology and
enters the realm of epistemology.

How
do we describe and know what there is? Quine’s principle answer is:
through conceptual schemes. Of course there are alternative
conceptual schemes. However, according to Quine, they aren't all
mutually exclusive. There's no one way of describing or knowing the
world correctly; as the metaphysical realists may well think.

The
two conceptual schemes Quine discusses are that of the physicalist
and that of the phenomenalist. Simplistically speaking, the
physicalist offers us a world of external objects. The phenomenalist,
on the other hand, offers us a world of, amongst other things, a
round sensum rather than the external object we call a 'penny'.
According to Quine, both conceptual schemes have their advantages.

Quine
is very easy-going about conceptual schemes…up to a point! The
phenomenalist offers us a world of “scattered sense events”
rather than one of objects qua objects. When we see a penny as
a penny, rather than as a round sensum, we are effectively
“simplifying our over-all reports”. Again, we assign “sense
data to objects” to simplify things.

Despite
the fact that I said earlier that Quine doesn't see these particular
conceptual schemes as mutually exclusive, Quine does think that they
are in a sense in competition with one another. Although they are in
competition, they both have their advantages. Each “deserves to be
developed”. It depends on what we want from our conceptual schemes.
In fact Quine describes the phenomenalist's conceptual scheme as an
epistemological enterprise. The physicalist's conceptual scheme is of
course physical (or scientific).